Goodbye Google

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-generated unless otherwise noted. robert@ocallahan.org ... Follow on X, Follow on Bluesky

Archive

2026

September

Goodbye Google

August

A Meta-Meditation On The Lord's Prayer (And DNA)

A Meditation On The Lord's Prayer

Queenstown Walks

July

Thoughts on 'Pacing The Frontier'

Karangahake Gorge To Te Aroha

March

Anthropic And AI Principles

January

Why Trump Is An Antichrist

2025

December

Taiwan

November

Pouakai Circuit 2025

AI And Jesus In Late 2025: A Road Trip Report

October

Some Thoughts About Money From A Christian In Big Tech

Crosbies Hut 2025

June

Not Joking About AI

Building A PC

April

Rakiura Northwest Circuit

February

Tongariro Northern Circuit 2025

January

Pararaha Valley 2025

2024

December

Mt Arthur/Tablelands/Cobb Valley

November

Queen Charlotte Track 2024

October

Auckland Half Marathon 2024

Advanced Debugging Technology In Practice

June

Waihohonu Hut 2024

So You Want To Build A Browser Engine

Real-Time Settlers Of Catan

April

Auckland Waterfront Half Marathon 2024

Whanganui River Journey 2024

2023

December

Rees-Dart Track 2023

Caples/Routeburn Track 2023

Abel Tasman Kayaking

November

Mount Pirongia 2023

Blog Migrated

April

Why I Signed The "Pause" Letter

Auckland Waterfront Half Marathon 2023

2022

December

Travers-Sabine Circuit 2022

Paparoa Track

September

Aotea Track 2022

Success, Privilege And God

July

Tūrangi Road Trip

May

Round The Mountain Track: Ups and Downs and a Twist Ending

April

New Zealand's COVID Strategy Worked (But It Could Have Been Better)

March

Motutapu Island Camping Trip

January

Motatapu Track

Hump Ridge Track

The End Of The Runway

2021

December

Mt Pirongia 2021

Do We Really Need A Link Step?

November

Some Observations On The NZ CovidPass System

October

How WHO Failed

September

Emulating AMD Approximate Arithmetic Instructions On Intel

rr Trace Portability: Diverging Behavior of RSQRTSS in AMD vs Intel

June

Spectre Mitigations Murder Userspace Performance In The Presence Of Frequent Syscalls

Tama Lakes Winter Tramp 2021

May

Forward Compatibility Of rr Recordings

Lake Waikaremoana 2021

April

Print Debugging Should Go Away

Demoing The Pernosco Omniscient Debugger: Debugging Crashes In Node.js And GDB

Visualizing Control Flow In Pernosco

March

On-Premises Pernosco Now Available; Reflecting On Application Confinement

What Would Jesus Do ... About Vaccination?

February

Mercer Bay

January

Dehydration

Tongariro Northern Circuit 2021

2020

December

Rees-Dart Track

Kepler Track 2020

Exploiting Precognition In Binary Instrumentation Of rr Replays

November

rr remix: Efficient Replay-Only Binary Instrumentation

DOM Recording For Web Application Demos

Debugging With Screenshots In Pernosco

rr Repository Moved To Independent Organisation

Pernosco Now Available For Individual Developers

Auckland Half Marathon 2020

October

Pouakai Circuit 2020

The Parable Of The Two Bus Drivers

September

New Zealand's Long Term COVID19 Strategy

August

Surprising Words In Luke 1:16-17

What's So Amazing About Mark 10:32

Scaling Debuginfo For Zero-Cost Abstractions

What Is The Minimal Set Of Optimizations Needed For Zero-Cost Abstraction?

June

Cape Brett 2020

My Google Maps Disaster

May

Why Forking HTML Into A Static Language Doesn't Make Sense

Omniscient JS Debugging In Pernosco

April

Have Some Humility, Mike Hosking

March

What If C++ Abandoned Backward Compatibility?

Debugging Gdb Using rr: Ptrace Emulation

January

Static Customization Of Function Signatures In Rust

Updating Pernosco To Rust Futures 0.3

2019

December

A Risk Of Transactional Politics For Christians

Nelson Lakes Tramping: Lessons And Observations

Nelson Lakes Tramping: Travers-Sabine Circuit

Nelson Lakes Tramping: Angelus Basin

November

Your Debugger Sucks

Supercharging Gdb With Pernosco

The Power Of Collaborative Debugging

Omniscient Printf Debugging In Pernosco

The BBC's "War Of The Worlds"

Explaining Dataflow In Pernosco

October

Improving Debugging Workflow With Pernosco

Auckland Half Marathon 2019

Pernosco Demo Video

Food In Auckland 2019

Pouakai Circuit

Is Richard Dawkins A Moral Realist?

September

Dissatisfied With Docker

July

Cape Brett 2019

Auckland Rust Meetup: "Building An Omniscient Debugger In Rust"

June

Stack Write Traffic In Firefox Binaries

Winter Tramp: Waihohonu Hut To Tama Lakes

May

A Few Comments On "Sparse Record And Replay With Controlled Scheduling"

Microsoft's Azure Time-Travel Debugging

Don't Call Socially Conservative Politicial Parties "Christian"

Debugging Talk At Auckland Rust Meetup

April

Goodbye Mozilla IRC

Update To rr Master To Debug Firefox Trunk

Mysteriously Low Hanging Fruit: A Big Improvement To LLD For Rust Debug Builds

Rust Discussion At IFP WG2.4

March

Marama Davidson And The Truth About Auckland's History

February

Banning Huawei Is The Right Decision

Rust's Affine Types Catch An Interesting Bug

Mt Taranaki 2019

January

Experimental Data On Reproducing Intermittent MongoDB Test Failures With rr Chaos Mode

2018

December

Vox On Nietzsche

Hollyford Track

Milford Track 2018

November

Capitalism, Competition And Microsoft Antitrust Action

Raglan

Comparing The Quality Of Debug Information Produced By Clang And Gcc

What Is "Evil" Anyway?

Comments on "REPT: Reverse Debugging of Failures in Deployed Software"

October

Auckland Half Marathon 2018

Problems Scaling A Large Multi-Crate Rust Project

Harmful Clickbait Headline About IT Automation

The Fine Line Between Being A Good Parent And A Bad Parent

The Costs Of Programming Language Fragmentation

September

More Realistic Goals For C++ Lifetimes 1.0

The Danger Of GMail's "Smart Replies"

"Crazy Rich Asians"

Rangitoto Fog

August

Long Live The Desktop Computer

ASAN And LSAN Work In rr

Diagnosing A Weak Memory Ordering Bug

The Parallel Stream Multiplexing Problem

July

Gerv

Why Isn't Debugging Treated As A First-Class Activity?

June

Yosemite: Clouds Rest And Half Dome

Bay Area Visit

Crypto-Christians In Tech

May

rr 5.2.0 Released

Intel CPU Bug Affecting rr Watchpoints

Update: Pernosco

rr Chaos Mode Improvements

Research Wishlist: A Filesystem For Efficient Host-Guest File Sharing

Priority Is Overrated

April

rr Trace Portability: x87 "Data Pointer" Broken On Skylake

CPUID Features, XSAVE, And rr Trace Portability

Heaphy Track #2

Payment Express's "Account2Account" Is Bad For Security

March

Speeding Up dwarfdump With Rust

Too Many DWARF Packaging Options

"Zach": AI Fraud In Christchurch

Tongariro Northern Circuit #2

January

Neal Stephenson's "Seveneves" (Mild Spoilers)

Long-Term Consequences Of Spectre And Its Mitigations

Captain Sonar

Hooray For cargo build --all-targets

The Fight For Patent-Unencumbered Media Codecs Is Nearly Won

Ancient Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified

On Keeping Secrets

Meltdown/Spectre Needs Better Disclosure

2017

December

Mixed Blessings Of Greenfield Software Development

Marriage On Credit

Routeburn-Caples

rr 5.1.0 Released

Maintaining An Independent Browser Is Incredibly Expensive

November

In Praise Of Rust's structopt For Command Line Parsing

Tararua Southern Crossing

October

Auckland Half Marathon 2017

Microsoft's Chrome Exploitation And The Limitations Of Control Flow Integrity

"Slow To Become Angry"

Type Safety And Data Flow Integrity

Legacy Code Strikes Again

Thoughts On Microsoft's Time-Travel Debugger

Building On Rock, Not Sand

Microsoft Using Chromium On Android Is Bad For The Web

September

Complaining About Twitter Again

Dreaming The Singularity

Facebook's "Explaining React's License" Doesn't

Some Opinions On The History Of Web Audio

Sonny The Prophet

rr 5.0 Released

rr Trace Portability

August

Fedora/Ubuntu Kernels Work With rr Again

Igloos Are Hard

Epsom Electorate Town Hall Meeting

Public Service Announcement: "localhost" Is Not Necessarily Local

When Virtue Fails

Stabilizing The rr Trace Format With Cap’n Proto

July

Selecting A Compression Algorithm For rr

Upstream Stable Kernels Work With rr Again

Let's Never Create An Ad-Hoc Text Format Again

Confession Of A C/C++ Programmer

Usenix ATC 2017

An Inflection Point In The Evolution Of Programming Langauges

Bay Area Progress Report

June

Patch On Linux Kernel Stable Branches Breaks rr

Rising Tolerance For Static Analysis False Positives?

Lazy Religion Tropes In Mass Media

Is The x86 Architecture Sustainable?

New "rr pack" Command

How I Found A 20-Year-Old Linux Kernel Bug

Another Case Of Obscure CPU Nondeterminism

WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

May

Should Debuggers Report Idempotent Writes?

A Couple Of Papers About Commodity Multicore Record And Replay, And A Possible Way Forward

rr Usenix Paper And Technical Report

Obscurity Inhibits Persuasion

Perceptions Of Violent Crime

April

Call Out China For Their Treatment Of NK Escapees

One Does Simply Walk Into Mordor

Rust Optimizations That C++ Can't Do (Version 2)

Rust Optimizations That C++ Can't Do

Pararaha Valley

Let's Make NZ More Expensive For Tourists

March

The Parable Of The Workers In The Vineyard Really Is About Grace

Blogging Vs Academic Publishing

Thoughts On "Java and Scala’s Type Systems are Unsound" And Fuzz Testing

Deterministic Hardware Performance Counters And Information Leaks

Using rr To Debug Go Programs

February

Against Online Voting

306 Points In "Lords Of Waterdeep"

"New Scientist" And The Meaning Of Life

What Rust Can Do That Other Languages Can't, In Six Short Lines

rr 4.5.0 Released

I Really Admire Jehovah's Witnesses

January

A Followup About AV Test Reports

Tripling Down Against USA Conference Hosting

Rustbelt Is Hiring

rr Talk At Auckland C++ Meetup, February 21

Really, Please Stop Booking International Conferences In The USA

Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft's)

Browser Vendors And Business Interests

Browser Vendors Are Responsible For The State Of Web Standards

Parenting Notes

Cheltenham Beach

How China Can Pressure North Korea

Is CMS Software Generally Really Bad?

2016

December

On "Arrival"

October rr Talk Online

Disemploy The Middle/Upper Class

Some Comments On "Sapiens"

November

Overcoming Stereotypes One Parent At A Time

Stop Saying "Xs Do Y" Disingenuously

Handling Hardware Lock Elision In rr

Misinterpreting Close Contests

Welcoming Richard Dawkins

Dangerous Permissions

October

Auckland Half Marathon #4

Implications Of ASLR Side-Channel Attacks

Valuing America

Dell, Your Website Security Is Broken